For information about Global Game Jam 2012, hosted by Miami, visit: aims.muohio.edu/gamejam

As games have taken hold as a major force in contemporary culture, increased attention has been paid to not just the formal instructional use of technologies, but also the informal (and increasingly ubiquitous) interaction of learning, literacy, and popular digital media. Understanding the role of games among learners of all ages has become a pressing issue, becoming a vibrant new area of research among learning scientists, literacy scholars, and game designers. If we are to further educational innovation beyond the limited forms of schooling that have typified American curricula for over a century, the principled investigation of games (and the potentially productive communities around them) becomes less a luxury, and more an imperative. AIMS offers a minor in Game Design, Development and Critical Study.

The AIMS Games and Learning Center takes on this challenge, and features faculty and resources from four divisions of Miami University (the School of Education, Health, and Society, the School of Fine Arts, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the College of Arts and Sciences). We address the interdisciplinary field of games and learning in several forms, including:

• Investigating the utility of games within schools, afterschool programs, and other designed curricula
• Leveraging games and game design to foster reading, writing, computational literacies, and digital media literacies
• Understanding the learning potential of “affinity spaces,” or ad hoc social communities connected to gaming fan cultures
• Analyzing commercial games as tools for educational critique, highlighting exemplars of “good learning” in the face of inadequate instructional models
• Designing games for specific learning goals and educational content, using gaming media as templates for the redesign of educational systems to better suit the needs of the 21st century.

Please contact Dr. Sean C. Duncan (sean.duncan@muohio.edu; http://se4n.org/) or Lindsay Grace (gracel@muohio.edu; http://lgrace.com) for more information.

The Advergaming Laboratory

The Advergaming Laboratory at Miami University is a new initiative to research and produce games for advertising, marketing and rhetoric. The Advergaming Laboratory at Miami University is engaged in research on games as a medium for the delivery of marketing materials, persuasive content and educational information. This research focuses on the power of gameplay to change the way people view their world. The areas of interest in the Advergaming Laboratory research agenda include persuasive games, critical gameplay, designing communities of play, empathy design, social impact gaming and educational game design. The Advergaming Laboratory also operates the A-Game Studio, a design group that pairs instructor-lead, student staffed teams with clients interested in promoting their ideas and products through advergaming.

More Information & Resources

Please visit http://aims.muohio.edu/advergaming or  contact Lindsay Grace (gracel@muohio.edu; http://www.lgrace.com) for more information.

If you are a current student or are interested in learning more about the gaming resources available at the Miami University Libraries, please visit their site for more details.